The “I” of the Beholder: the Impacts of Gender Differences and Self-Referencing on Charity Advertising

This research investigates gender differences in terms of the response to altruistic and egoistic charitable appeals, and demonstrates how self-referencing can influence advertising processing under different viewing situations. Different from previous studies, self-referencing is operationalized in perceived nature of a non-profit organization. An experiment is conducted through the Internet. When self-referencing is high, female participants tend to be more responsive to the altruistic appeal and male counterparts are more likely to be persuaded by the egoistic appeal. The results also indicate that lower self-referencing may reduce the aforementioned effects of charity framing appeals. Compared with the altruistic appeal, the egoistic appeal is more effective for women viewing the NPO with low perceived self-referencing. In contrast, men viewing the same NPO are more persuaded by the altruistic appeal than the egoistic one. Implications of the current findings for existing theory are discussed along with directions for future research.

Citation:

Chun-Tuan Chang, Yu-Kang Lee, and Kuang-Hao Chen (2009) ,"The “I” of the Beholder: the Impacts of Gender Differences and Self-Referencing on Charity Advertising", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 748-749.